Talk #2: Michaela Amort [Tschilp]
I visited a session about fashion at the barcamp Vienna in June (read my report here), which rose my further interest in the relation between fashion and web 2.0. So I asked Vienna-based marketing expert and well-known fashion blogger Michaela Amort (Tschilp) to bring some light into the darkness. (Read original version in German here.)
CR: What`s your personal approach to fashion? What`s the reason for you to write your blog Tschilp?
MA: I virtually grew up with the sewing machine, my mother created many beautiful things and it was a given for me to modify or create clothes according to my liking.
Later I joined the fashion class of Karl Lagerfeld at University of Applied Arts in Vienna for one year. But during my studies I´ve been working as a journalist as I really missed writing.
For the last several years I have been working in the field of advertising and marketing with a focus on New Media – but my interest for fashion remained unchanged. Notably there`s still a lot to do in the context of fashion and online media.
CR: How did you like the barcamp?
MA: I really liked it. It was the most frequently attended barcamp in Vienna I have ever been to. Hence, the audience was more mixed and less IT- charged than at those barcamps I had attended before. It would have been inconceivable in former times to organize a session on the topic of fashion with a room chock-full of people up to the very end.
CR: Which relevance do you consider barcamps could have for the fashion industry? How should the format evolve?
MA: Currently I do not see any pertinence. The format comes from the Internet startup scene and is heavily influenced by it.
The fashion industry which you can see as a classical brick and mortar business has just started to realize the transformations – apart from e-commerce – enabled by the new culture of online media.
In fashion sharing knowledge has not been mentioned as a virtue until now. This may sound paradox, but the fashion system is deeply conservative.
Nevertheless, the big global corporations are just about to engage in and make sense of all the online conversations and dialogues which coin their image – even though this has already been going on on various platforms outside their influence. Certainly, this is still seen as a new channel for target group management and or public relations.
At exactly this point I do see a chance for small fashion enterprises. Without being stuck with the whole marketing/PR machine and all its pre-defined rules and style guides, a flexible and open social intercourse with their friends, fans and followers should come naturally to the fashion start-ups. Considering that the barcamp could be an absolutely fertile and exciting place for networking and exchange arena eventually causing one or another innovative partnership.
By the way, we (a small group from the Viennese blog- and fashion startup-scene) are currently discussing to concretely start a fashion barcamp in autumn.
CR: How do you estimate the relevance of virtual space for fashion? Which development do you assess as positive? Are there negative examples?
MA: Virtual Space is – seen as a medium for communication – in fact the prime medium ( measurable e.g. in its reach). Accordingly, the relevance is obvious.
For fashion another quality appears because real time communication changes the role of the end-users. They want to see the collections of tomorrow without time delay, judge them actively and get them today. For a long time this was solely reserved by B2B and press-fashion-weeks and now gets scrutinized and commented in real time by all those who are interested. That`s not a question of negative or positive – it happens and finally nobody locks him/herself out.
CR: Live-streaming of fashion shows…useful or not?
MA: In respect of a multiplication of the message – all fashion shows transfer a message – live streams are rather meaningfull. It`s not about replacing the presence on location, it`s rather a question of massive distribution of the brand and its image, and, at the end of generating demand. Unfortunately the incorporation into social media is often missing, for example the technically easy integration of Twitter is “neglected” instead of using it for feedback and dialogue.
CR: Would you dare a forecast on the future of fashion in the web?
MA: The e-commerce in the field of fashion will rise fairly, which does not mean that real shops will disappear.
We´ll see more high-professional fashion videos, which are especially conceptualized for the web.
Live streams with social embeddedness, as well in virtual as in real life – will become an usual part of the communication mix. Burberry exemplified this marvellously with the 3D stream in February this year.